The Star Citizen Thread v5
- Thread starter Brett C
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^^This.
It's about time to show improvements in the core of the gameplay. Those unimportant things, like flight model, controller parity, etc. ya know?
It's been time to show all this a year ago. Now... who cares? The money train keeps going, cultists don't care about the actual game, casual gamers gobble up the fake "demos" and throw their money at them... Star Citizen is already a successful business. Five years from now it will release a couple of maps and ten missions to play inside them and that will be the end of the story. The chance of the game coming out died when they figured they don't need to make the game to make money.
Everyone knows that all projects are exactly comparable. There is an official point where everything begins and ends.
Back in 1984 when David Braben and Ian Bell finished working on Elite someone mentioned the word "Dangerous" in an unrelated conversation. A transcript was immediately sent to the queen of England who registered that work had begun on the fourth Elite game in earnest even though the two subsequent games hadn't even been created yet. The queen called for her massive quill of official registration and marked into the giant stone ledger of fact that work on Elite Dangerous had begun because someone had thought of it. The Queen then goes on to update Wikipedia where all facts are equal and people can make graphs from them.
Chris Roberts' work on Star Citizen was not registered officially until 2014 because before that he was just messin' around and it didn't count because of reasons that don't apply to other projects.
Back in 1984 when David Braben and Ian Bell finished working on Elite someone mentioned the word "Dangerous" in an unrelated conversation. A transcript was immediately sent to the queen of England who registered that work had begun on the fourth Elite game in earnest even though the two subsequent games hadn't even been created yet. The queen called for her massive quill of official registration and marked into the giant stone ledger of fact that work on Elite Dangerous had begun because someone had thought of it. The Queen then goes on to update Wikipedia where all facts are equal and people can make graphs from them.
Chris Roberts' work on Star Citizen was not registered officially until 2014 because before that he was just messin' around and it didn't count because of reasons that don't apply to other projects.
I enjoyed quite a bit of the stuff in this week's ATV, the new format is certainly a lot better.
Can't say I'm a fan of the "inner thought" stuff, the idea sounds good but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired, and for some reason it seems a bit pretentious.
The worst bit of the show for me are the 2 people presenting it, the stuff they say just sounds really awkward and unnatural.
Sadly this is true. The sad part being CIG have to show very little indeed to keep money coming in. There's very little motivation to getting towards a release build which sells for commercial prices when you can just fonk this stuff out and generate sales.
Eventually people that keep pouring their money into jpeg chariots are going to run out of ships to buy, certainly that will slow down/stop monetary flow - unless of course more images are churned out.. I mean concepts.. for people to throw their money at to pretend they have amassed some kind of meaningful armada. I can't help but think some of these people are buying these ships, collecting images of them, creating a little scrap book, pretending each ship is a new friend, having tea parties with them, just strange stuff since they sure as hell aren't flying them.
I suppose some of the more fervent supporters could make new accounts and just keep buying this stuff if they wanted to.
Objection! It does perfectly what he wants: Showing off fancy render demos on game venues to collect "crowdfunding" money from fanatics for his movie business. It was chosen by him deliberately for this purpose and it still fits it quite well, despite starting to look outdated.
That's exactly what the Hangar Module is/was. It was solely intended to show off how beautiful the ships were in CryEngine, it didn't even require anything new in CryEngine to do - that was the very first of the buggy CryEngine tech demo which was just 3D models in basic CryEngine to show them off. Wasted time on building that out just to show off the beauty of CryEngine. But the real purpose was not for the beautiful ships and for all of the whales to sit there and drool over a static model in CryEngine... it was for sales, lots and lots of sales. The Hangar Module was such a joke and the very first indication development was totally off the rails because time was being wasted not on the core and functionality but on a little CryEngine tech demo to show off the jpegariots to the faithful so they'd throw more money away.
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No, Chris Roberts said it was in development since 2011, and it was part of the original KS pitch You know, the whole "we already have one year of development done and think we'll need two more years so release in 2014". Thats why the other media reported on that as well in 2012:
http://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-preview-the-open-world-space-sim-of-our-dreams/
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/star-citizen-kickstarter-successful/1100-6398788/
But apparantly we need to change the narrative again, so whatever CR said in 2012 didnt happen. Wouldnt surprise me if in some years SC-fans start telling us the kickstarter actually begin in 2016, the original release date was 2025 and they are perfectly on schedule.
Unrelated sidenote: anyone following SC/SQ42 got some links to SQ42 gameplay previews? I assumed they would be around but can only find a very small number of mocap/CGI/'walking through a base' vids. If there isnt, is there any hint whether they will show it at citizenscon? It just seems weird to have a studio with such a massive output of vids have so little on the game that is supposedly so close to release, whereas ME:A and COD:IW are already releasing such vids. Are these SQ42 sneaks/previews part of 'general update' vids, so I cant google them easily?
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No, Chris Roberts said it was in development since 2011, and it was part of the original KS pitch You know, the whole "we already have one year of development done and think we'll need two more years so release in 2014". Thats why the other media reported on that as well in 2012:
http://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-preview-the-open-world-space-sim-of-our-dreams/
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/star-citizen-kickstarter-successful/1100-6398788/
Whether they actually did start in 2011 is a different matter, but either they did or CR lied. Again. But apparantly we need to change the narrative again, so whatever CR said in 2012 didnt happen. Wouldnt surprise me if in some years SC-fans start telling us the kickstarter actually begin in 2016, the original release date was 2025 and they are perfectly on schedule.
Unrelated sidenote: anyone following SC/SQ42 got some links to SQ42 gameplay previews? I assumed they would be around but can only find a very small number of mocap/CGI/'walking through a base' vids. If there isnt, is there any hint whether they will show it at citizenscon? It just seems weird to have a studio with such a massive output of vids have so little on the game that is supposedly so close to release, whereas ME:A and COD:IW are already releasing such vids. Are these SQ42 sneaks/previews part of 'general update' vids, so I cant google them easily?
Orlando will contradict anything CIG says to make CIG look better. Like that time he said 2.x was a "real alpha" unlike the alpha of any other game, even though Lando has explicitly called it a preprepreprealpha.
For me the length of development isn't the issue. The problem is lack of any sort of communication to backers to confirm what kind of length is needed. Since the original kickstarter the project has always taken money on the suggestion that release is soon. Backers have spent a great deal of effort justifying how long it takes and comparing it to other games, which is fine. You can't fob off a publisher with "Soon(tm)" you have to give very specific dates, I think when taking money through crowdfunding I have ethical concerns with a company that doesn't suggest a release year and stick with it. I get it that CR wants to do things differently and build the best damn thing by going on for as long as he needs and having all the cash he needs to do it, but it's kind of funded on very opaque information and nudge nudge wink wink it'll be out next year but then it isn't because we need another year and here's another nice demo and we all go around again.
It seems like they had this original intention of suggesting a release quarter and when they missed it they'd send out a fairly good rundown of why they missed it. But when they missed too many they just kind of shrugged and said, well we need as much time as we need and the community rushed in to justify it and explain it for them. Which is great, but if they need an unprecedented amount of time they need to communicate that clearly to new backers OR stop taking cash. Imagine if we were still waiting for Oculus to release the DK1 or Pebble to release the first version of their smart-watch and they just kept pumping out videos saying they need as much time as they need while asking backers to stump up more cash because it's coming soon. Would trade show demos keep people interested?
It seems like they had this original intention of suggesting a release quarter and when they missed it they'd send out a fairly good rundown of why they missed it. But when they missed too many they just kind of shrugged and said, well we need as much time as we need and the community rushed in to justify it and explain it for them. Which is great, but if they need an unprecedented amount of time they need to communicate that clearly to new backers OR stop taking cash. Imagine if we were still waiting for Oculus to release the DK1 or Pebble to release the first version of their smart-watch and they just kept pumping out videos saying they need as much time as they need while asking backers to stump up more cash because it's coming soon. Would trade show demos keep people interested?
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But even if that is it, why not just release an actually enjoyable MVP and take it from there? Surely the '2014 SC' was supposedly going to be MUCH better than whatever we have now. But all this 'we need extra time to make it perfect' sloganeering hasnt resulted in any actual improvement over what was supposed to be a commercial release two years ago. We still have no mining, exploration, proper trading or smuggling etc etc. There is no '100 handcrafted systems', they switched to a PG hybrid and we dont even have that.
Why dont they just make a game. I dont know, maybe release yearly updates that improve upon features or add new ones? After each year have backers vote (with their wallet!) on which features should come in the next year? Just imagine FD had copied the CIG method. We'd still all be in one-system, filled with bugs and lacking almost any kind of gameplay, with weekly vid-updates on all the cool stuff we might eventually get. And when you look at how divided this community can get on specific details (should you wait 5 min for ship transfer or not?), imagine whats gonna happen in the SC community when they start adding gameplay mechanics. Right now all the SC-fans can be optimistic because they all imagine CR will do exactly what each individual expects. At some point, if he deos intend to make a game, he needs to make choices. Many, many choices that will frustrate many, many people. And all that could be avoided if they clearly communicated how the game is going to actually work and stick to that.
...because delivering the basic pillars of a space game isn't as important as showing off the new thing you can do with eyes in Cryengine. Those are your money shots. Apparently our expectation that over-arching systems should be in place early on probably mean we just don't understand games development because woo...shiney eyes...huh? huh? pledge today! :-D
Cash reasons.
That can pretty much explain most, if not all, decisions CIG has made.
Cue people saying "yes they're a business they're allowed to do that!" forgetting their earlier claims about CIG making a game first, money second.
That's the funny thing: if Chris just outright said “look, we're a business — taking your money is our reason for existing” then that would, if perhaps not excuse then at least make their actions sensible and logical in the context of what they say they're doing. But instead, we have all this guff about building dreams and saving PC gaming and bringing back a type of game that has been lost. None of which seems to be what they're actually doing, and none of which should need the kind of predatory practices they've started using.
Yarp.
For me it comes under the umbrella category of "don't pee on me and then tell me it's it's raining".
If they were at least honest about it it would save time.
CMDR_Orlando
Banned
Because pushing themselves to make the best game possible is being dishonest. Sigh, CIG can't win can they. [rolleyes]
[video=youtube;K8t1Hg02PLY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8t1Hg02PLY[/video]
[video=youtube;K8t1Hg02PLY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8t1Hg02PLY[/video]
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